Societal Self-empowerment in Germany: A Comparison of Fridays for Future and Corona Skepticism 3658408642, 9783658408640

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Peter Kirsch · Hanno Kube · Reimut Zohlnhöfer

Societal Self-empowerment in Germany A Comparison of Fridays for Future and Corona Skepticism

Societal Self-empowerment in Germany

Peter Kirsch · Hanno Kube · Reimut Zohlnhöfer

Societal Self-empowerment in Germany A Comparison of Fridays for Future and Corona Skepticism

Peter Kirsch Abteilung Klinische Psychologie Zentralinstitut für Seelische Gesundheit Mannheim, Germany

Hanno Kube Institut für Finanz- und Steuerrecht Universität Heidelberg Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Reimut Zohlnhöfer Institut für Politische Wissenschaft Universität Heidelberg Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-40864-0 ISBN 978-3-658-40865-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40865-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Foreword

This book is the result of a joint project by the authors at the Marsilius Collegium of Heidelberg University, which we carried out as Fellows of the Collegium from 2020 to 2021. The starting point was the—often also publicly discussed—question of whether and, if so, to what extent people are increasingly taking the law into their own hands and disregarding applicable law and social conventions. When we designed our project in 2019, there was no talk of a worldwide pandemic, the consequent restrictions on our coexistence and the resulting social debate on the meaning and implementation of measures. At that time we thought of the school strikes by the Fridays-for-Future movement, but also of phenomena such as attacks on rescue services and municipal politicians or the actions of radical animal rights activists. Our goal was to describe, measure, explain and reflect on this behaviour, which we refer to as societal self-empowerment, and to consider how, if it is indeed a substantial problem, it can be countered. Then came the Corona pandemic and with it a form of societal self-empowerment that has given the topic a whole new dimension in terms of its visibility and presence in public discourse. Although we would have liked to do without the pandemic, it has opened up a field of research for us and for countless other scientists that is unique. In this way, we were able to study the dynamics of societal self-empowerment in times of crisis through a repeated representative survey and thus gain insights that would otherwise not have been possible. As a result, our project has gained even more significance and relevance and has received much more public attention than we originally expected. This is how the present book came about. We hope that you, dear reader, will find an interest in it and gain new insights from it. At this point we would like to express our particular thanks to the Marsilius Collegium of Heidelberg University, which, through our Fellowship, has created

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Foreword

opportunities that have made this project and the present publication possible in the first place. In particular, we would like to mention the Managing Director Tobias Just and the Directorate of the Collegium, Prof. Dr. Friederike Nüssel and Prof. Dr. Michael Boutros, who have followed our project with great benevolence and interest and supported it both financially and ideologically, not least through the financing of our surveys. We would also like to express our sincere thanks to the other Fellows of our class at the Collegium for the many helpful and enlightening discussions during our time there. We are indebted to Kathrin Ackermann, Fabian Engler, Frederic Kohlhepp, Marie Schliesser and Silja Wübbelmann for their comments on the questionnaire and on the text of this book and for their support in preparing the data and results. Heidelberg in July 2022

Peter Kirsch Hanno Kube Reimut Zohlnhöfer

Contents

1 Societal Self-Empowerment: Concept and Classification . . . . . . . . . .

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2 What is Societal Self-Empowerment? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Self-Empowerment as an Idealistic, Political or also Ethically Motivated Violation of Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Legal Justification of Prima Facie Self-Empowerments . . . . . . . 2.3 Two Examples of Rights-Infringing Self-Empowerment . . . . . . . 2.4 Self-Empowerment within the Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5 5 6 11 12 13

3 How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Abstract Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Societal Self-Empowerment and the Fridays for Future Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Societal Self-Empowerment with Respect to Corona Restrictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Societal Self-Empowerment in the Empirical Cases in Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 Corona Self-Empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Data and Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Socio-Economic Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Affectedness by the Pandemic and the Measures to Combat it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Trust in Institutions and Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33 33 36

19 22 29 31 31

39 43

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4.5 Self-Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Problem-Solving Ability of the Political System . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Party Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 Interpersonal Trust and Conspiracy Mentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.9 Attitude Towards Self-Empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.10 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

50 52 55 58 60 61 64

5 Fridays for Future Self-empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Data and Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Socio-economic Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Trust in Institutions and Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Self-efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Problem-solving Ability of the Political System . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Party Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Interpersonal Trust and Conspiracy Mentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8 Attitude towards Self-empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.9 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67 67 69 71 73 74 77 78 79 80 81

6 Discussion: Between Representational Gap and Conspiracy Belief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Instrumental vs. Expressive Self-empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Party Convergence and the Representational Gap . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 The Representational Gap and Satisfaction with Democracy . . . 6.4 The Representational Gap from a Psychological Perspective . . . 6.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83 83 86 92 98 101 101

7 Conclusion: What to do Against (Expressive) Self-empowerment? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Summary of Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 What to do? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105 105 108 112

Appendix 1: Questionnaire Design, Representativeness of Respondents and Variable Coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Appendix 2: Questionnaire of the online survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Financial and debt crisis, refugee crisis, climate crisis, coronavirus pandemic, Ukraine war — we live in a time that seems to be determined by crises, worries and fears. In such a time, trust in established political and social institutions and procedures is strained. The people rightly ask whether these institutions and procedures are suitable and able to master the great crises and lead the country into a good future. Sometimes the trust seems to dwindle so much that individuals and groups begin to take the initiative back into their own hands and, in this sense, to empower themselves in order to express their discontent and to move things. An example are the Fridays for Future demonstrations that take place during school hours in order to emphasize the importance of the political issue and to attract attention. Another example are the Corona demonstrations, where regulations are deliberately disregarded. The same applies to break-ins in animal breeding operations, where violations of criminal law are accepted in order to document and make the suffering of the animals visible. The members of the “Last Generation” movement block roads to highlight the urgency of the issue of climate protection. And when municipal politicians are increasingly insulted and attacked physically in recent times, this too shows a form of self-empowerment that seems to be based on the loss of trust and dissatisfaction with the performance of the political system. How great and far-reaching the potential for possible self-empowerment is, becomes clear when one looks at groups such as the “Reich citizens”, the “self-administrators” (prepping) and the followers of various conspiracy theories. These initially diffuse, but at the same time clear findings were the starting point for the consideration to investigate the phenomenon of societal selfempowerment more closely with scientific methods in order to understand the phenomenon, to distinguish its problematic, but also its common good promoting dimensions and at the end possibly to be able to contribute to the question of which mechanisms social cohesion is based on. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 P. Kirsch et al., Societal Self-empowerment in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40865-7_1

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Societal Self-Empowerment: Concept and Classification

Such an undertaking can only succeed interdisciplinarily from the outset. As far as coexistence in the community is structured by legal rules and is otherwise shaped by unwritten rules and conventions that are exceeded in the course of societal self-empowerment, legal science is addressed, whose area of inquiry is the binding rules of the community. Because self-empowerment starts with the individual whose actions have to be explained psychologically, a study of selfempowerment cannot do without the expertise of psychology. And last but not least, self-empowerment is also about a finding that can be observed throughout society and affects social life and, in substance, mostly specific political issues. Therefore, the political science view of the subject matter must not be missing. These considerations explain the composition of the group of researchers who have come together on this issue and who are also the authors of this book. We define societal self-empowerment as the conscious violation of legal and non-legal norms for political, idealistic and ethical reasons, this in particular in distinction to the field of classical crime. This definition is therefore quite broad and includes various forms of and motives for self-empowerment. In our analyses, we have identified two forms of self-empowerment: on the one hand, forms in which the violation of a legal or non-legal rule primarily serves to draw attention to an issue. The norm itself is not questioned, but its general validity is ultimately confirmed (for example in the case of a school strike). We call this form of self-empowerment instrumental self-empowerment. It refers to the concept of civil disobedience, which derives its effectiveness precisely from the violation of the rule. However, the definition is also open to forms of self-empowerment in which the violation of the norm should primarily act as such, as an expression of distance and rejection, be it of a certain political decision, the rule violated, but not least also of the political system as a whole, which has produced this rule. We consider this type of self-empowerment, which we see as potentially problematic for coexistence in the community, to be expressive self-empowerment. We find clear empirical indications that expressive self-empowerment is an expression of the perception of the affected people that their political positions are not or not sufficiently represented in the political system. Based on this definition and delimitation of the topic, the investigation is divided into various sections, which are reflected in the chapters of the book. It begins with the exact structuring of the subject, above all from a legal perspective. How does the legal system deal with different forms of self-empowerment by society? How far do legal justification grounds, fundamental rights or also state-philosophical considerations extend? How does the legal system react to the observed violations of non-legal conventions? Do they represent a welcome

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Societal Self-Empowerment: Concept and Classification

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impulse for a political-democratic development and renewal, or should the legal system oppose them—by means of new legal delimitations? Following this, we take the empirical view. In order to answer the question of how much self-empowerment currently exists, we have carried out two representative surveys at different times in order to specifically determine how the phenomenon of self-empowerment is reflected in numbers and contexts. On the one hand, we have abstractly asked when the respondents feel that they (do not) have to comply with rules. Is it permissible to follow one’s conscience on occasion or does one always have to comply with rules? Is it even permissible to take the law into one’s own hands? Or do you only have to comply with rules if you are at risk of being caught or if you agree with the rule? On the other hand, we have focused on two different empirical forms of self-empowerment and asked corresponding questions, on the one hand on the Fridays for Future demonstrations, on the other hand on Corona demonstrations. This content-related linking on the one hand and the repetition of the survey on the other hand have led to very informative results, which we first present in summary form. Against the background of this empirical exploration, we consider—in two further chapters—the profiles of the Fridays for Future self-empowered and the Corona self-empowered persons. The empirical investigation of both aspects is carried out as parallel as possible in order to be able to draw comparisons between the two groups. This shows surprising differences between people who support Fridays for Future and those who are skeptical of the Corona measures. The former are typically well integrated into the political system, politically interested, they trust science and social media, but also believe that politicians try to keep their election promises. Supporters of the climate school strikes are satisfied with the problem-solving ability of the political system—with the central exception of climate protection -, they tend to parties to the left of the center, have high social trust and we find no evidence of alienation from the political system: Neither in terms of political self-efficacy nor in terms of dissatisfaction with democracy or the choice of protest or anti-system parties can deviations from the average of the respondents be seen. This is not the case, however, with people who arrogate power to themselves with regard to the Corona rules. Their relationship to society and politics can be summarized with the keyword alienation: That these people are dissatisfied with Corona policy and consider the corresponding restrictions to be unjustified is self-evident. What is more striking is the low interpersonal trust of these people, which is also accompanied by significantly lower trust in democracy and the rule of law as well as lower satisfaction with democracy than the average. The significantly higher inclination to abstention and to voting for the AfD also points

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Societal Self-Empowerment: Concept and Classification

in this direction, as does the mistrust of science and public media, the trust in social media and the pronounced conspiracy mentality. In a subsequent discussion chapter, we then sum up, so to speak, and discuss further conclusions from the results. In particular, we examine from a sociological and psychological perspective the thesis that expressive self-empowerment reflects a representational gap. In the past fifteen years, many highly consequential decisions have been made—from the rescue of the euro to migration policy to the fight against the Corona pandemic with the help of far-reaching restrictions on basic rights—which also received outstanding public attention. Nevertheless, the established parties in the Bundestag were largely in agreement with each other, often there were hardly any significantly divergent positions if one leaves out the details. This, it seems, could have led to a lot of frustration among supporters of the non-represented position, which was reflected politically in alienation from the representative democracy, which then led to expressive self-empowerment. A final conclusion serves to assess and look to the future. The big question is how, in particular, the potentially harmful expressive self-empowerment can be countered, how the perceived representational gap can be closed and how the necessary trust in the community, in particular in the performance capability of our political system, can be maintained or restored. Only if we trust and— rightly—can trust, will we be able to master the current crises and also cope with future crises that will come.

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What is Societal Self-Empowerment?

Societal self-empowerment is a phenomenon that relates to rules and rule violations. Rules and rule violations are a central subject of legal studies. For this reason, it makes sense to approach societal self-empowerment from a legal perspective and to measure it legally, thus structuring, classifying and making it understandable.

2.1

Self-Empowerment as an Idealistic, Political or also Ethically Motivated Violation of Law

Empowerment is the conferral of power, from a legal point of view the conferral of legal power, the entitlement or also the provision with a right. In this sense, a legal empowerment is only needed by the state according to the concept of the modern constitutional state. The state is correspondingly entrusted with tasks, equipped with competences and powers (Straßburger in print). In contrast, man is of course free. He acts—for which John Locke stands in particular in the context of state philosophy (Locke 1992 [1689]: 2. Abhandlung, Kap. 5)—on the basis of pre-existing freedom rights, which can be opposed to state power. Unlike the state, man therefore does not need legal empowerment at first. However, the freedom of the one must be brought into line with the freedom of the other. For this purpose, the state is empowered by society and equipped with competences to reconcile the individual spheres of freedom, first and foremost to safeguard social peace and security. On the basis of this empowerment, the state creates a legal order. This legalizes the natural freedoms of man and at the same time restricts them in order to take into account the freedoms of all others. The freedom of the individual in turn becomes an entitlement, in this sense therefore a legal empowerment, which has a certain scope and certain limits. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 P. Kirsch et al., Societal Self-empowerment in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40865-7_2

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2 What is Societal Self-Empowerment?

Within the legal system, a further distinction is then made (Siegel 2022: Rdnr. 396 ff.). For example, there are legal entitlements that are based directly on the naturally underlying and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, such as the right to build on one’s own property anchored in building law (freedom to build), or the commercial right to operate a business (freedom to pursue a trade). Administrative regulatory regimes are basically preventive in nature in these areas, so they are intended to enable and restrict the exercise of the relevant freedoms as little as possible. Approval decisions are therefore typically not at the discretion of the authority, but are to be made positively if the factual requirements are met (bound decision). In contrast, however, there are also legal entitlements that are—without any constitutional basis—only conferred by the state, typically at the discretion of the authority and sometimes with repressive target orientation, as in German law, for example the right to use groundwater. However, this internal differentiation is not relevant for the conceptual determination of societal self-empowerment. Because regardless of this differentiation, self-empowerment can be described as behaviour by which the actor consciously sets himself above the framework of the legally designed freedom, that is, above the limits of the individual entitlement. Self-empowerment is therefore the calculated violation of law or rules that is aimed at acquiring factual, non-legal, and therefore illegal power of action. The aforementioned, provisional definition of self-empowerment is very broad. It includes classical crime as well as all other cases in which the individual is solely concerned with obtaining illegal, in particular material, advantages. What is characteristic of individual or societal self-empowerment, which is of interest here, is that it is based on idealistic, political or ethical motives at its core. Think of the school-law-breaking climate strike during school lessons or of the unauthorised demonstration by opponents of state measures to combat Covid-19. Societal self-empowerment is therefore to be defined in the present context as idealistic, political or ethically motivated violation of law.

2.2

Legal Justification of Prima Facie Self-Empowerments

The focus on such motivated violations of law now requires us to take a second legal level into account, on which the special motives for offenses play a role. On the second level, the level of justification, prima facie self-empowerments can be justified because of the underlying motives, that is, re-integrated into the legal

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system. This requires us to analyze the scope of the legal justification grounds in view of our object of investigation. Justification grounds are contained to some extent in parliamentary statutory law. Ideal-typical examples of justification grounds in civil law are self-defense, emergency and self-help (§§ 227, 228, 229, 859 and 860 BGB). In criminal law, there are, for example, the criminal self-defense, the justifying emergency and the preliminary private arrest (§§ 32 and 34 StGB, § 127 Abs. 1 StPO). Administrative law also knows justification grounds; for example, if a conflict between private individuals is to be assessed in police law, justification grounds are to be taken into account which legitimate the action of one person towards the other person. In all of the aforementioned areas of law, the justification of a factual selfempowerment exceeding the given legal authority usually requires that in the concrete, acute situation a predominantly significant legal good is threatened to be violated and that the self-empowerment serves to protect this legal good. Furthermore, there is usually no way to obtain state aid in time. The consequence of the relevant justification is the exception granted to the individual to defend the object of law in question himself. The state monopoly of exercising power thus recedes point-wise where the state power is unable to effectively protect the law. Instead, the individual is empowered to enforce the law in the concrete case. So the attacked may defend himself against the attacker, the owner may evict the intruder from the property and the robbed may arrest the caught thief until the police are on site. Protection goods of the justification grounds for self-empowerments in civil law, criminal law and administrative law are always only concrete, tangible individual rights such as life, physical integrity, property and possession. Idealistic, political or even ethical positions are, however, not suitable as such from the outset to consider self-empowerments in accordance with the justification grounds of civil law, criminal law or administrative law as justified. The justification grounds do not take such positions into account. In addition, on the level of constitutional law, fundamental rights, i.e. fundamental freedom and equality claims based on fundamental rights, can act as legitimizing action. On the one hand, the fundamental rights require a freedomand equality-based design of statutory law. On the other hand, the fundamental rights radiate on the initially freedom-restricting statutory law that has to be interpreted and applied in accordance with the Constitution. A concrete example of the effect of the fundamental rights is the conscientious objection to military service, which is expressly guaranteed by fundamental rights in Art. 4 para. 3 sentence 2 GG. The statutory law, which provides for conscription (on the basis of Art.

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12a para. 1 GG), provides for corresponding exceptions which take into account the fundamental right to refuse (see in particular the Act on the Refusal of Military Service on Conscientious Grounds of 09.08.2003, BGBl. I 2003, p. 1593, last amended by Act of 28.04.2011, BGBl. I 2011, p. 687). The second case, the radiation of fundamental rights on the existing, freedom-restricting statutory law, is illustrated by the school law dealing with the fact that Muslim parents forbid their daughter to participate in co-educational swimming lessons, which are however provided for by school law. The parents and their children can rely on the freedom of religion according to Art. 4 para. 1 GG in order to interpret and apply the state law (see for example a decision of the Federal Administrative Court from the year 2013, BVerwGE 147, 362: “The individual pupil can, based on religious conduct guidelines which he regards as decisive, only in exceptional cases demand exemption from a lesson.”). In practice, mediation solutions are sought and found which, on the one hand, take into account the state school mission (Art. 7 para. 1 GG), on the other hand the freedom of religion of the parents and children. Thus, fundamental rights positions can lead to the result that prima facie existing self-empowerments are re-integrated into the law. Unlike in the case of the legal justification grounds of civil law, criminal law and administrative law, not only concrete, individual protective interests such as physical integrity or property can be invoked with fundamental rights, but also more abstract and at the same time more far-reaching freedoms such as freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion and freedom of assembly. These freedoms can carry out idealistic, political and ethical motivated action. However, it should also be taken into account that the fundamental freedoms are in need of oncretisation in many parts and are above all also subject to restrictions. The regulating, democratically legitimate legislator and the administrative authorities applying the law have considerable decision-making powers in this respect, which substantially relativize the importance of fundamental rights as a means of re-integrating prima facie-self-empowerments into the law. The most dramatic form of legitimation of self-empowerment anchored in the Basic Law can be found in the provision of Article 20(4) GG, which was inserted into the Basic Law as part of the emergency legislation in 1968. This is the right of resistance, which has been known and controversially discussed in state philosophy for centuries. Article 20(4) GG reads: “All Germans shall have the right of resistance against anyone who undertakes to eliminate this order, if other remedies are not possible.” (The term “order” refers to the liberal-democratic constitutional order.) The right of resistance applies to the state authority as well as to private forces that attempt to eliminate the constitutional order. It allows all necessary

2.2 Legal Justification of Prima Facie Self-Empowerments

9

acts of resistance that are aimed at preserving this order. Again, it is assumed that state aid cannot be obtained. The right of resistance thus intervenes in a situation in which the legal order of the community is wobbling. The Basic Law attests to the legality of the actions of anyone who resists in order to preserve this order. The private, initially rule-breaking application of force is thus legitimized on a constitutional level and thus re-integrated into the law. The idealistic, political or ethical violation of the law, the subject of our investigation, differs in its target direction, of course, from the type of violation of the law that is legitimized by the right of resistance. The societal self-empowerment does not aim to defend itself from a threat to the constitutional order in order to protect and assert it, but rather it aims at addressing actual or alleged deficiencies within the existing and intact order. The conditions of Article 20(4) of the Basic Law are thus clearly not met in acts of societal self-empowerment. Finally, no explicit normative basis has a legitimizing legal idea, which goes back to the Heidelberg legal philosopher and former Minister of Justice in the Weimar Republic Gustav Radbruch. Initially a convinced legal positivist, Radbruch formulated in 1946 under the immediate impression of National Socialism, “that the positive law, secured by statute and power has priority even if it is substantively unjust and impractical, unless the contradiction of the positive law to justice reaches such an intolerable degree that the law as ‘wrong law’ has to give way to justice.” (Radbruch 1946: 107) Even this, later so-called Radbruch formula therefore aims to justify prima facie existing violations of the law and thus to attribute them to the law, here understood as justice in the material sense. The criterion is the unacceptability of the application of the law or loyalty to the law. Unlike the right of resistance, which is based on external circumstances, namely the serious endangerment of the constitutional order, in the Radbruch formula the unacceptability of compliance with the law is in the factual situation, that is, an internal, moral and conscience-related circumstance. The Radbruch formula has actually been used in judicial practice—in a few individual cases—for the one hand in the processing of individual consequences of National Socialism (for example BGHZ 3, 94 (107); BVerfGE 23, 98), on the other hand for the coping with the inner-German wall guards problem (BVerfGE 95, 96). For the legal classification of current phenomena of societal self-empowerment, the Radbruch formula plays just as little a role as the constitutional right of resistance. The concept of civil disobedience, on the other hand, which can be relevant in cases of societal self-empowerment, has no legally justifying effect. Civil disobedience is generally defined as a form of political participation through conscious, attention-generating violation of the law. This violation of the law is not legally

10

2 What is Societal Self-Empowerment?

justified. It is precisely the essential element of civil disobedience to point out certain deficiencies by means of the intended violation of a norm, that is, the illegality of a behaviour, in order to bring a political concern to light. As with the right of resistance, legal rules are broken in civil disobedience. However, unlike the right of resistance, the aim of civil disobedience is not to take action against a threat to the constitutional order and to stabilise it by breaking the law, but to work within the existing and stable constitutional order to achieve certain political objectives or to eliminate perceived deficiencies. Not a general duty of civil obedience, which does not exist, but specific individual norms such as § 123 StGB (trespass), § 185 StGB (insult), § 223 StGB (bodily injury), § 240 StGB (coercion) or § 303 StGB (damage of property) are violated. The persons concerned do not reject these specific norms as such, but rather confirm their validity. Because the persons concerned assume that the attention for the concern follows precisely from the fact that a norm accepted as valid is violated. In a certain way, civil disobedience thus acts, regardless of the political concern in each case, to confirm the legal order. The legal order is instrumentalised to bring a certain issue to the fore. Against this background, the category of civil disobedience fits for numerous cases of societal self-empowerment. If pupils organise a climate strike during school time, they want to emphasise the importance of their concern by violating the school law. If citizens demonstrate against government measures to combat Covid-19 in contradiction to the limits of the right of assembly, they accept the violation of norms or even make use of the media attention that results from the violation of norms for their own purposes. And even verbal or physical attacks on local politicians are not due to personal enmity, but to political motives—which does not change the reprehensible nature of such attacks. In summary, it can be said that violations of the law motivated by idealism, politics or ethics cannot be justified legally in most cases. The justification grounds of civil law, criminal law and administrative law are based exclusively on concrete and concretely endangered individual rights such as life, physical integrity, property and possession. In turn, fundamental rights positions can only be used to a very limited extent to legitimize prima facie apparent legal violations in the context of societal self-empowerment. The fundamental rights protect, inter alia, the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. However, the freedom protected by the Basic Law is subject to a considerable need for agreement and thus concretisation, which is why the Basic Law leaves corresponding leeway for the democratically legitimate legislature and the administrative authority applying the law. This in turn reduces the scope for justifying violations of the norms that fill these leeways. The constitutional right of

2.3 Two Examples of Rights-Infringing Self-Empowerment

11

resistance only comes into consideration in the event of a serious threat to the constitutional order as a whole. And Radbruch’s formula serves to deal with dictatorships. Against this background, it is understandable that actions within the framework of societal self-empowerment fall to some extent into the—legally not justifying—category of civil disobedience.

2.3

Two Examples of Rights-Infringing Self-Empowerment

The classification of societal self-empowerment can be illustrated using two examples. Fridays for Future demonstrations during school time violate—here exemplarily for Baden-Württemberg—the school attendance obligation regulated in §§ 73 ff. of the Baden-Württemberg School Act. The clear regulations do not allow exceptions directly in favor of the demonstrating students or dispensation possibilities of the school. An interpretation that places the fundamental right to freedom of expression and assembly of the students (Art. 5 para. 1 sentence 1 and Art. 8 para. 1 GG) in the foreground is not possible in view of the clear wording of the regulations. However, the provisions of §§ 73 ff. SchulG BW are not unconstitutional. They concretize the school task of the state anchored in the constitutional rank (Art. 7 para. 1 GG). When the constitutional positions are compared, it can be assumed that a design of the school lesson, which does not allow demonstration participation during school time—with whatever contentrelated concern—does not violate the fundamental rights of the students. The legal justification grounds of civil law, criminal law and administrative law are just as little relevant as the constitutional right of resistance or even Radbruch’s formula. This shows that a legal justification for the Fridays for Future demonstrations as an expression of societal self-empowerment is conceivable from the outset only in accordance with the basic rights of the actors. However, the basic rights justification also fails. The actions of the pupils thus constitute a form of civil disobedience. A second example: In Baden-Württemberg, the obligation to wear a mouthnose protection in certain situations to combat the Covid-19 pandemic results from § 3 para. 1 of the Corona Ordinance of Baden-Württemberg, which is based on a legal basis in § 32 of the Infection Protection Act of the Federal Republic of Germany. The refusal to wear a mouth-nose protection violates this obligation and can result in a fine. The obligation interferes with the general freedom of

12

2 What is Societal Self-Empowerment?

action protected by Art. 2 para. 1 GG, possibly also with the freedom of expression (Art. 5 para. 1 sentence 1 GG). It also applies here that restrictions on the freedom of the persons concerned can be justified by a sufficiently important public interest and in compliance with the principle of proportionality. In this case, the freedom rights of the persons concerned stand in opposition to the aim pursued by the mask obligation, which in turn has constitutional rank. According to Art. 2 para. 2 sentence 1 GG, the state is even obliged to take active protective action to protect life and health (constitutional duty of protection). Depending on the individual case, the freedom of action of the persons concerned on the one hand and the purpose pursued by the mask obligation, the protection of life and health of the people, on the other hand, have to be reconciled. If one assumes that the coordination between the interests concerned has been successful as a whole, § 3 para. 1 of the CoronaVO BW is also constitutional and violations of the ordinance remain illegal from a constitutional perspective. Other possible justification grounds do not come into consideration in this context. To the extent that violations of the obligation to wear a mouth-nose protection can appear to be an expression of societal self-empowerment, it thus becomes clear that also this form of societal self-empowerment can be legally justified only to the extent of the basic rights, but that also here the legal justification—subject to individual cases of a possibly failed fundamental rights balancing—fails. Also this manifestation of societal self-empowerment remains illegal. Whether it can thus be classified as a form of civil disobedience is, however, somewhat more problematic than in the case of the Fridays for Future demonstrations. Because here the violation of the law does not necessarily serve to draw attention to a political issue. Ultimately, it depends on the assessment of the individual case.

2.4

Self-Empowerment within the Law

In addition to the socially self-empowering violation of law, there are cases of societal self-empowerment that take place entirely within the law, that is, they occur from the outset without any violation of law. Self-empowerment in this variant is characterized by the violation of not legal, but exclusively social norms and conventions. Examples are the brutalization of democratic discourse, the spread of “alternative facts” to justify one’s own positions and the establishment of—still maintaining the state monopoly of force—citizen militias to ensure security. Self-empowerment within the law reflects a variety of developments within society. Constitutionally, it is a form of exercising private and political freedom. Self-empowerment within the law can often point to existing deficiencies and

References

13

problems and set impulses for improving social coexistence. The violation of established social norms and conventions gives the decisive impetus for appropriate political changes. Sometimes, however, manifestations of self-empowerment within the law can also be harmful. In this—and only in this—case, the reaction required by the constitutionally guided politics should be to legally prohibit the actions. Recent examples of parliamentary reactions to harmful forms of self-empowerment within the law were, for example, the Act to Strengthen the Protection of Enforcement Officers and Rescue Workers of 2017 and the Act to Combat Right-Wing Extremism and Hate Crime of 2020. From a constitutional perspective, the issue of societal self-empowerment within the law refers to the concept of the constitutional prerequisite or also the constitutional expectation (Isensee 2011). Legally granted and guaranteed freedom only becomes real if the holders of fundamental rights accept their freedom (Kirchhof 1998: 61) and exercise it in accordance with the freedom of all others. As a liberal state, the constitutional state—in other words—is dependent on conditions that it cannot guarantee without losing its liberalism (Böckenförde 1991: 112 f.). The state must trust the freedom and democracy of the people in this respect.

References Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 1991. Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisation, in: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: Recht, Staat, Freiheit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 92–114. Isensee, Josef. 3 2011. Grundrechtsvoraussetzungen und Verfassungserwartungen an die Grundrechtsausübung, in: Josef Isensee and Paul Kirchhof (eds.): Handbuch des Staatsrechts der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bd. IX. Heidelberg: C.F. Müller, 264–411. Kirchhof, Paul. 1998. Die Einheit des Staates in seinen Verfassungsvoraussetzungen, in: Otto Depenheuer, Markus Heintzen und Matthias Jestaedt (eds.): Die Einheit des Staates. Heidelberg: C.F. Müller, 51–69. Locke, John. 1992 [1689]. Zwei Abhandlungen über die Regierung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Radbruch, Gustav. 1946. Gesetzliches Unrecht und übergesetzliches Recht. Süddeutsche Juristenzeitung 1(5): 105–108. Siegel, Thorsten. 14 2022. Allgemeines Verwaltungsrecht. Heidelberg: C.F. Müller. Straßburger, Benjamin. in print. Herrschaft als Auftrag. Der Verfassungsbegriff des demokratischen Konstitutionalismus und seine Bedeutung für die supranationale Integration Deutschlands. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

3

How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

We have surveyed the extent of societal self-empowerment in Germany through two representative online surveys conducted primarily in July and December 2020 (see details in the appendix). In doing so, we have tried to get to the bottom of the extent of societal self-empowerment in two ways. On the one hand, we have asked our respondents to answer abstract questions about whether one always has to obey the law or whether there are exceptions, whether one is allowed to take the law into one’s own hands or whether one is only obliged to obey the law under certain conditions. On the other hand, specific questions about individual behaviour in particularly prominent and much-discussed current cases of self-empowerment were to be answered, namely with regard to the school climate strikes of the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement and the compliance with Corona rules. In the following, we will first present the results of our survey for the abstract questions and then for the concrete societal self-empowerment in the cases of Fridays for Future and Corona.

3.1

The Abstract Level

On the abstract level of general ideas about how important respondents consider it to obey the law, we asked three questions. The first question was: “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?” Asking in this way—which emphasizes the exceptional character of breaking the law in a conflict of conscience—a broad majority of almost two thirds of our respondents (63.7%) take the view that one should be allowed to follow one’s conscience in exceptional situations (Fig. 3.1). Only

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 P. Kirsch et al., Societal Self-empowerment in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40865-7_3

15

16

3

11.3

How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

24.8

63.7

Follow without exception

Follow one's conscience in exceptional situations

Cannot say

Fig. 3.1 Response proportions: “Must laws be followed without exception?” (Source: Own survey, own analysis)

around a quarter of respondents (24.8%) say that one must always obey the law. 1

Since this question has also been asked five times in Germany as part of the Role of Government Survey of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) between 1985 and 2016, a corresponding historical comparison is possible at this point (cf. Table 3.1). Our value for those who think that one must always obey the law is approximately at the long-term average (25.2%),2 well below the value of the last survey in 2016, when just under 35% of those surveyed said that one must always follow the law. Conversely, 52.5% of those surveyed in 2016 as part of the ISSP survey said they would follow their conscience in exceptional cases, while the average over all surveys was 63.7%, and thus again close to the value we found. Whether these changes since 2016 reflect a greater willingness to self-empower, which could be caused, for example, by current events such as 1

The differences between our two surveys are minimal on this question: In the first survey, 64% were of the opinion that one should be allowed to follow one’s conscience in exceptional situations, 25% said that one must always obey the law and 10.7% could not make up their minds. In the second survey, the corresponding values were 63.2%, 24.6% and 12.1%. 2 In 1990 and 1996, separate surveys were conducted in East and West Germany. These were taken into account as separate surveys in the calculation of the mean. However, the two parts of the country differed only marginally on this issue.

3.1 The Abstract Level

17

Table 3.1 Agreement (in percent) to the unconditional observance of laws according to data from the Role-of-Government survey, 1985–2016 Laws must be followed without exception

Follow conscience in exceptional cases

Undecided/No answer

1985

11.5

85.0

1990 (West)

23.2

68.3

8.5

1990 (East)

24.6

65.0

10.4

1996 (West)

23.1

61.1

15.9

1996 (East)

24.7

60.1

15.2

2006

34.1

53.5

12.4

2016

34.9

52.6

12.6

Average

25.2

63.7

11.2

3.5

(Source: ISSP 1985, 1990, 1996, 2006, 2016)

the Fridays for Future protests or the dissatisfaction of certain population groups with the Corona restrictions, is not implausible, but requires further investigation. While the majority of those surveyed appear to be willing to follow their conscience in exceptional situations, even if the behavior contradict the law, a general acceptance of societal self-empowerment cannot be claimed by any means. So, only a minority of less than one fifth (18.1%) of our respondents think it is right that people take the law into their own hands, while almost two thirds (63.5%) of respondents reject such behavior (Fig. 3.2).3 The very different responses to these two questions suggest that societal self-empowerment is apparently acceptable as an exception under very special circumstances—as the first question suggests— for many respondents, but that a large majority rejects a general disregard for social and state rules, as implied by the second question, which much more generally inquires if people would take the law into their own hands. While respondents in the previously discussed questions had to choose one option each (either follow laws without exception or follow conscience in exceptional cases, etc.), at a later point in the first (but not the second) survey, we asked about various options for self-empowering behavior separately (Fig. 3.3). In line with the results presented above, the majority of respondents also said in a separate question that one must follow one’s conscience in exceptional situations 3

Again, the differences between the two surveys are marginal. In the first (second) survey, 18.3% (17.8%) thought that one could take the law into one’s own hands; 62.9% (64.1%) did not find this, 18.6% (17.7%) were undecided.

18

3

How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

18.1

18.2

63.5 Yes

No

Don't know

Fig. 3.2 Answer shares: “Can one take the law into one’s own hands?” (Source: Own survey, own evaluation)

(59.7%), while significantly fewer respondents (33.8%) said that one must always follow the law. Although most respondents actually perceive these two options as opposites, as shown by a highly significant negative correlation between the two items (r = −0.673, p = 0.000), it is striking that the proportion of respondents who generally agree that one must always adhere to the law is higher when the two statements (adhere to the law vs. follow conscience) are asked separately (33.8 vs. 25%). This could support the interpretation that, for some respondents, the option of violating the law for conscience’ sake is only acceptable as a rare exception. The data from Fig. 3.3 is also interesting in that other reasons for violating the law find little support. Only 12.5% of respondents make compliance with the law dependent on the government’s compliance with the law, and the idea that one must only comply with the law if one agrees with it or that non-compliance has negative consequences (e.g. punishment) is only minimally accepted (2.7% and 3%). In view of the results of the abstract questions on societal self-empowerment, it can be concluded from the survey that self-empowerment is by no means generally accepted by society. Rather, most of those surveyed demand compliance with the law from themselves and their fellow citizens. Deviations are only accepted to a limited extent, namely in the context of conscience conflicts. The next step

3.2 Self-Empowerment and the Fridays for Future Movement

19

59.7 60 50 40

33.8

30 20 10

12.5 2.7

3

Fo llo w

w ith ou te xc ep tio n Fo llo w co ns cie On nc ly e ho ld w he n it is th On e. ly .. ho ld w he n us Fo in llo g. w .. on ly if th er e is no ...

0

Fig. 3.3 Proportion of responses for self-empowerment, separate question. (Source: Own survey, own evaluation)

is now to ask whether this finding changes if we go one step down the ladder of abstraction and confront our respondents with concrete cases of possible societal self-empowerment. We present the results of the assessment of the Fridays for Future movement and the compliance with the coronavirus rules by our respondents in the next two sections.

3.2

Societal Self-Empowerment and the Fridays for Future Movement

The Fridays for Future (FFF) movement, originally founded by Swedish highschool student Greta Thunberg in August 2018, serves as our first concrete case with which we want to measure the extent of societal self-empowerment in Germany. The goal of the FFF movement is to enact climate protection measures that go beyond the measures adopted so far and promise to achieve the goal of the 2015 Paris UN Climate Conference to limit global warming to 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial era. This movement has received considerable public attention in Germany in 2019 and even influenced the political agenda (Raisch and Zohlnhöfer 2020).

20

3

5

How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

8.6

16 47.2 36.4

85.5

Self parcipated Nobody

Someone from family Demos right

Demos not right

Don't know

Fig. 3.4 Participation in FFF demonstrations (left, Fig. 3.4a) and assessment of the FFF demonstrations as right (right, Fig. 3.4b). (Source: Own survey, own evaluation)

We can speak of societal self-empowerment with regard to the FFF movement because the central instrument of the movement is demonstrations that take place every Friday during school time (so-called climate strikes). This usually contradicts the school obligation of the pupils, so that we can speak of societal self-empowerment. Our survey included three questions dealing with the climate school strikes. First, it was about whether the respondent him/herself or another family member 4 participated in the demonstrations (Fig. 3.4a). While around five percent of the respondents in both surveys said they had participated in FFF demonstrations themselves, another 8.6% said that family members (probably often the children) had been involved in such activities. Broader than the participation in FFF activities was the sympathy of the respondents for the movement. Just under half of the respondents (47.2%) found the demonstrations right, a good third (36.4%) rejected them (Fig. 3.4b). For our purposes, it is of course central that the participants in the demonstrations have violated the compulsory school attendance. If we explicitly ask respondents whether they think the demonstrations should take place during 4

Since the majority of the FFF participants are likely to have been minors, but only people over the age of 17 were surveyed in our survey, we tried to better assess the extent of unauthorized behavior with the question of the participation of family members in the school strikes.

3.2 Self-Empowerment and the Fridays for Future Movement

21

10.9

22.2

66.7

Compulsory educaon has priority

Demos during school hours ok

Don't know

Fig. 3.5 Response proportions: Priority for compulsory education or not? (Source: Own survey, Own analysis)

school time or whether the compulsory school attendance should take precedence, the support for the school strikes decreases. Only between a quarter and a fifth of the respondents (22.2%) think that the demonstrations should take place during school time, while two thirds (66.7%) think that the compulsory school attendance should take precedence (Fig. 3.5).5 If one wants to map societal self-empowerment with respect to the Fridays for Future movement in an aggregated way, it makes sense to combine the three items mentioned. For each question, we coded the answer option with 1 that expresses support for the FFF school strikes (school strikes correct, own participation, participation of family member, support for demonstrations during school time), while all other answer options were coded with 0. Subsequently, the three

5

The numbers from both surveys are relatively similar: In the first (second) survey, 5.0% (5.1%) of the respondents said that they had participated themselves, 10.1% (6.8%) reported that a relative had participated and 83.9% (87.4%) said that no family member had participated in an FFF demonstration. In the first (second) survey, 48.3% (45.8%) of the respondents supported the demonstrations, 35.1% (37.9%) considered them to be wrong, 16.3% (15.6%) could not decide. Finally, 23.8% (20.2%) of the respondents in the first (second) survey found it correct that the demonstrations took place during school time, while 64.5% (69.5%) gave precedence to the compulsory school attendance. 11.5% (10.0%) were undecided.

22

3

How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

48.7 45.9

50 45 40 35

25.1

30

27.6

21.2

25

16.9

20 15 10

6.3

5.1

5 0

Full support

Some support

Low Support

No support

Fig. 3.6 Aggregation of items for Fridays for Future. (Source: Own survey, own evaluation. Hatched bars: Survey July 2020, dotted bars: Survey December 2020)

recoded items were added up. For example, respondents who not only gave priority to the school obligation over the demonstrations, but also neither participated themselves nor had a family member who participated, and finally also considered the demonstrations to be wrong, were assigned the value 0 (“no support”). Respondents who only supported the FFF movement in one or two items received the corresponding intermediate values. Figure 3.6 shows the result of this aggregation for both surveys separately. Across both surveys, just under half of the respondents (47.1%) did not express any clear support for the climate strike movement at any point, while on the other hand only 5.8% supported all aspects of the FFF movement. Here too, therefore, there is a—perhaps surprisingly—limited degree of societal self-empowerment in Germany.

3.3

Societal Self-Empowerment with Respect to Corona Restrictions

Towards the end of 2019, a new respiratory illness first appeared in Wuhan (China), caused by a previously unknown coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). The disease COVID-19, caused by the virus, quickly spread outside of China as well, and on March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the disease a global pandemic. In

3.3 Self-Empowerment with Respect to Corona Restrictions

23

mid-March 2020, a number of far-reaching measures to limit the spread of the disease were adopted in the Federal Republic of Germany, including the widespread restriction of social contacts, the closure of schools, restaurants, many stores and service providers of body care, border closures, and the obligation to wear everyday masks, e.g. in shops and public transport. Since March 2020, the politics of the coronavirus has been the dominant political topic in Germany. Since March 2020, the data of the Politbarometer of the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (2022) have shown the pandemic to be the most important problem in Germany, e.g. in March 2021 85% of those surveyed named Corona as one of the two most important problems in Germany. This topic thus dominated the political agenda of the time since March 2020. From the perspective of societal self-empowerment, the acceptance of the measures to contain the pandemic (hereafter referred to as Corona measures) is particularly interesting. On the one hand, the measures were obviously associated with the restriction of a large number of basic rights, so that they interfered massively with individual lifestyle. In this respect, the incentives could have been particularly great not to comply with the rules. On the other hand, it was particularly important that the population complied with these rules in order to successfully contain the spread of COVID-19. We have measured the willingness to self-empower in relation to the Corona measures by four items. First, the respondents were asked whether they had complied with the restrictions (similar to van Rooij et al. 2020), then it was asked more specifically whether the respondents had already downloaded the Corona Warning App, which had been made available shortly before the first survey, or whether they intended to do so, whether they would be willing to be vaccinated if a vaccine were available, and whether they had participated in demonstrations against the restrictions imposed by the Corona measures. It should be noted in this context that only the first question reflects societal self-empowerment in the strict sense, because only then is it about complying with binding rules, while neither the use of the Corona warning app nor the vaccination were legally required (vaccines were not even available when both surveys were conducted). However, our understanding of societal self-empowerment goes beyond the violation of laws and, in the case of the warning app and vaccination, there can be no doubt that these were two very central components of the Corona strategy of the political decision-makers in Germany. Accordingly, the refusal to participate (even if this refusal is legal) is quite relevant to the question of the extent of societal self-empowerment. Similarly, participation in demonstrations cannot be classified as societal self-empowerment in the strict sense if they are approved and corresponding rules are observed—on the contrary, the right to

24

3

45

42.9

How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

42.3 40.3

39.7

40 35 30 25 20 11.5

15

10.5

10

2.9 3.2

5

1.9 1.5

1.6 1.5

0 Always

Mostly

Oen

Somemes

Rarely

Never

Fig. 3.7 Compliance with Corona rules (self-report). (Source: Own survey, own evaluation. Hatched bars: survey July 2020, dotted bars: survey December 2020 (first published in Kirsch et al. 2022: 51))

demonstrate is of course a fundamental democratic participation right. However, many of the demonstrations against the Corona restrictions were characterized precisely by the fact that certain rules (e.g. with regard to minimum distance and wearing masks) were deliberately not observed (Heinze and Weisskircher 2022: 2),6 so that one can also speak of societal self-empowerment here. However, how widespread was societal self-empowerment with regard to the Corona measures among our respondents? Most respondents in both surveys said that they had always (39.7 or 42.9%) or mostly (42.3 or 40.3%) complied with the Corona rules, while only very small minorities (3.5 or 3.0%) said that they had rarely or never complied with the rules (Fig. 3.7). It should be noted at this point that these are self-reports by the respondents, which cannot be objectively verified. Nevertheless, the picture shows a widespread compliance with rules by the respondents, although, as described, this involved far-reaching interventions in individual lifestyle. This picture was also reflected in a relatively high level of satisfaction with the work of the federal government in containing the Corona pandemic in the summer of 2020: more than two thirds of our respondents (68.3%) were satisfied, 37% even were very satisfied. This satisfaction is likely due to the fact that, at 6

Compare, for example, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/covid-19-pandemie-coronademonstrationen-positionen-und.2897.de.html?dram:article_id=476457 (last accessed on 28.10.2020).

3.3 Self-Empowerment with Respect to Corona Restrictions

25

the time of the survey, the number of cases had declined sharply as a result of the measures taken and increasingly liberalisations could be adopted. In contrast, the pandemic situation had changed considerably by the time of the second survey, with the number of new infections having increased massively. This change was also reflected to some extent in the assessment of the federal government’s activities in combating the Corona crisis, with satisfaction in December 2020 only at 55% of respondents, and only 25% were very satisfied, compared to 37% in summer. However, it is noteworthy that, despite the declining satisfaction, compliance with the Corona rules remained at the high level of summer. A more nuanced picture emerges when it comes to the willingness to install the Corona Warning App, which has been available since 16 June 2020 (and thus two weeks before the start of our first survey) (Fig. 3.8). Around a third (32.2%) of those surveyed in July 2020 said that they had already installed the app, while just under a tenth (9.5%) claimed that they could not install the app for technical reasons, e.g. because they do not own a mobile phone or because their mobile phone does not meet the technical minimum requirements for the app. In this group, the non-installation cannot be understood as self-empowerment. On the other hand, a strong minority of 45.3% of those surveyed said that it was rather or even very unlikely that they would download the app. In particular, the nearly one-third of those surveyed who considered it very unlikely to install the app could well be seen as a group that could have a tendency towards selfempowerment, as they refused to use a central instrument of the state’s pandemic response. Interestingly, five months later, these data had changed very little. Although the number of those who had installed the app had increased in the meantime and the number of those who said they were likely or very likely to install the app had decreased accordingly, the proportion of those who were rather or very unlikely to install the app had not decreased significantly. The willingness to be vaccinated against Corona was also surprisingly low among our respondents, considering that only a vaccination of the majority of the population appeared to be a realistic perspective to return to normality. Nevertheless, in July 2020, only just under 55% of respondents said that they were very likely or quite likely to be vaccinated (Fig. 3.9). In contrast, the 13.8% of respondents who said that it was not at all likely that they would be vaccinated appear to be particularly unresponsive to calls for joint action against the pandemic. Hence, at least these people can be considered as self-empowered, even though it should be noted that, at the time of the survey, firstly, infection rates had fallen sharply everywhere and, secondly, no vaccine was available, so the question was hypothetical.

26

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How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

37.9 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

32.2

30.1 32

15.2 10.4

12.1

9.5 9.7

6.6

No

te ch

ni

ca l

Ve ry

po

ss

un

ib

ilit

y

lik el y

y er

un

lik el

ike ly ew ha tl

Ra th

Al

So

m

re ad

yi

Ve ry

ns ta l

le

lik el y

d

2.4 1.6

Fig. 3.8 Installation of the Corona warning app. (Source: Own survey, Own analysis. Hatched bars: July 2020 survey, dotted bars: December 2020 survey)

33.7 35 30

26.1

25

24.5 21

19.9

21.5 17.3

20 12.1

15

13.8

9.8 10 5 0 Very likely

Quite likely

Paral-paral

Lile likely

Not at all likely

Fig. 3.9 Readiness for vaccination against Corona. (Source: Own survey, Own analysis. Hatched bars: July 2020 survey, dotted bars: December survey. 2020)

However, even under the impression of sharply increased infection rates and the more realistic perspective of a vaccine being available soon (application for approval of the first vaccine in the EU on 01 December 2020), the willingness to be vaccinated among the respondents of our second survey in December 2020 remained low, indeed it had even fallen compared to the first survey: Only 46%

3.3 Self-Empowerment with Respect to Corona Restrictions

27

of our respondents were now very likely or likely to be vaccinated, almost 30% considered it to be quite or very unlikely that they would be vaccinated. Finally, we take a look at participation in demonstrations against the Corona restrictions (Fig. 3.10). It turns out that only a very small part of our respondents say that they have participated in such demonstrations, namely less than 4%. This does not seem to underestimate the participation in these demonstrations at least, because the number of participants in such demonstrations for the year 2020 is estimated to be a few tens of thousands in the literature (Grande et al. 2021: 5–6), although the mobilization potential could have been significantly higher (Grande et al. 2021). Similar to the above self-empowerment in the case of the Fridays for Future movement, an aggregation of the different items should also be attempted for Corona compliance. Again, all variables are recoded so that higher values indicate a higher degree of self-empowerment. In addition, the additional variance is used that arises because the Corona variables (with the exception of the question on participation in demonstrations) were not dichotomous, but rather in several stages. For example, the general question of compliance with the Corona rules is coded 0 if answered with “Always kept to the rules”, 1 for “mostly”, 2 for “often”, 3 for “sometimes”, 4 for “rarely” and 5 for “never”. A similar procedure is used for the other items, with the following responses being coded with

95.9

96.6

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20

3.7

2.9

10 0 Yes

No

Fig. 3.10 Participation in demonstrations against Corona measures. (Source: Own survey, own evaluation. Hatched bars: survey July 2020, dotted bars: survey December 2020)

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How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

0 for the Corona warning app: The app has already been installed, is very likely to be installed and cannot be installed for technical reasons. Since there is only one dichotomous response option for the question of participation in demonstrations, non-participation is coded with 0 and participation with 2 (for details of the aggregation, see Appendix 1). Aggregating the four items, we obtain an index ranging from 0 (= always kept to the Corona restrictions, warning app installed, very likely vaccination, no participation in demonstrations) to 14 (never kept to the rules, installation of the app and vaccination very unlikely, participation in demonstrations against Corona restrictions). The corresponding distribution is shown in Fig. 3.11. Even on this aggregated level, it becomes clear that the great majority of respondents comply with the rules (or at least claim to do so). Around half of the respondents (52 or 49 %) score 0 to 3 points on the 15-point scale. If one considers that respondents who mostly complied with the Corona restrictions, are likely to install the warning app, are quite likely to be vaccinated and have not participated in demonstrations, already have a value of 3, it becomes clear that these are extremely law-abiding people. If one adds up all respondents up to a value of 5 (e.g. people who mostly adhered to the Corona restrictions, are likely to install the warning app, did not participate in demonstrations, but are unlikely to get vaccinated), just under three quarters of respondents (74.7 or 71.6%) can be classified as not susceptible to

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 Full compliance

Full self-empowerment

Fig. 3.11 Aggregation of items on Corona compliance (in percent of respondents). (Source: Own survey, own evaluation. Hatched bars: Survey July 2020, dotted bars: Survey December 2020)

3.4 Self-Empowerment in the Empirical Cases in Comparison

29

societal self-empowerment—despite the massive restrictions described, which the measures to contain the Corona pandemic entailed. On the other hand, the proportion of hard societal self-empowerment with values of 10 and above (e.g. people who rarely adhered to the Corona restrictions, for whom it is rather unlikely that they will install the Corona warning app, who are unsure about vaccination and who participated in a demonstration against the Corona restrictions; value 10) is low at 3.7 or 3.0% of all respondents.

3.4

Societal Self-Empowerment in the Empirical Cases in Comparison

Finally, it has to be examined whether the persons who show themselves as self-empowered in the two empirical examples of our study, Fridays for Future and Corona, are the same groups of persons. In order to investigate this, we first formed a group of self-empowered persons in relation to the two empirical examples, which we set against a group of rule followers. For this purpose, we relied on the aggregated FFF and Corona scores introduced above. For Fridays for Future, we first defined those persons as self-empowered who showed support for FFF in at least one item (i.e. had a score between 1 and 3), and set this group against those respondents who had an aggregated value of 0, i.e. neither participated in FFF demonstrations nor found them right and also claimed priority of the duty to attend school. For the example of the Corona restrictions, we set the stricter criterion of an aggregated Corona compliance score between 0 and 3 for the rule followers, while respondents with an aggregated score of 4 and above were coded as Corona self-empowered. The values set in bold in Table 3.2 show the relative proportions of four different groups: people who can be considered rule followers with regard to both FFF and Corona (cell 1), people who self-empower in one but not the other area (cells 2 and 3), and respondents who self-empower in both areas. If one assumes that there is only a certain group of people who, regardless of the subject, tend to self-empower, one would expect the majority of respondents to be in cells 1 (rule follower) and 4 (self-empowered). But this is not the case, as in these two cells there are significantly less than half of all respondents (together 43.1%). Rather, the numbers suggest that the majority of respondents are “selective selfempowered people”, who largely follow the rules in certain areas, but are also willing to break the rules in others. Intriguingly, for our two empirical examples, there is even a tendency for respondents who can be considered self-empowered

30

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How Much Societal Self-Empowerment is There?

Table 3.2 Self-empowerment at Fridays-for-Future and Corona No support for FFF

FFF supporter

Total

Corona rule follower

20.4% 90.9% (strict) 1

30.2% 5.7% (strict) 2

50.6% 96.6% (strict)

Corona self-empowered

26.7% 3.4% (strict) 3

22.7% 0.0% (strict) 4

49.4% 3.4% (strict)

Sum

47.2% 94.3% (strict)

52.8% 5.7% (strict)

(Source: Own survey, own calculation) Note: The wide definition of self-empowerment is printed in bold and includes the proportion of people with aggregated Corona scores between 4 and 14, Corona rule followers have scores between 0 and 3. In FFF, people with an aggregated score of 1 to 3 are considered selfempowered under the broad definition, people with an aggregated score of 0 are considered rule followers. The strict definition of self-empowerment is set in italics and for the Corona measures includes the proportion of people with aggregated scores between 10 and 14, Corona rule followers have scores between 0 and 9. In FFF, people with an aggregated score of 3 are considered strict FFF supporters, all other people are not considered self-empowered.

with regard to Corona to support FFF less and vice versa. So 57.2% of FFF supporters adhere to the Corona rules, while 54% of Corona self-empowered people give priority to school attendance, have not participated in the FFF demonstrations and consider them to be wrong. However, these values are based on a very broad definition of societal selfempowerment. In a further step, we therefore empirically defined the concept more strictly: For the Fridays for Future questions, we now only consider those respondents as self-empowered who score the maximum value of 3, for the Corona questions we consider self-empowerment only from a value of 10 and more. The corresponding values can be found in Table 3.2 set in italics. Employing this much stricter definition, the number of self-empowered people naturally becomes much smaller and we therefore identify the majority of respondents (90.9%) as pure rule followers. However, what is more interesting is that we do not find a single person in both surveys taken together, that is, among more than 2,400 respondents, who is both a strict self-empowered person in the area of Fridays for Future and in the area of Corona measures. Statistically, there is indeed a weak but highly significant negative correlation between self-empowerment in the areas of climate school strikes and Corona

References

31

(measured by the respective aggregated index; rs = −.159, p